Movie Review: Jane

Jane *** ½ / *****

Directed by: Brett Morgen.

Written by: Brett Morgen.

 

The discovery, in 2013, of over 100 hours of footage of Jane Goodall during her time in Gombe in the 1960s – thought lost forever – is the basis for Brett Morgen’s documentary Jane. He was clearly the right director for the material – as he’s proven with The Kid Stays in the Picture (with Nanette Burstein) about Robert Evans, the best ever 30 for 30 Documentary June 17^th, 1994 – about a very busy day in sports news, and no just because it was the day O.J. went on that chase in the white Bronco, and Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, Morgen is incredibly skilled at taking hours and hours of footage, and editing it together in a way that makes it all flow, given it broader resonance. Having Goodall herself still around to narrate the film helps too – it allows her to expand on the context of what we’re seeing, and why it was so groundbreaking. Add in Phillip Glass’ best score in years, and you really do have one of the year’s best looking and sounding docs. My only real complaint about the film – which does mar it somewhat – is that someone decided that the film had to be a fairly typical biopic about Goodall’s life as well – forcing the material into a direction that isn’t quite as interesting as the footage itself.

 

That footage was shot by Hugo Van Lawick – assigned by National Geographic to go out and film Goodall after she had already been in Gombe for a while – and was making remarkable discoveries. The footage is stunning and beautiful – and looks amazing, not something you really expect when it was shot more than 50 years ago, and has been “lost” for most of that time. The colors are glorious, and you understand by Van Lawick is considered one of the best nature photographers in history.

 

The film though is – and rightly so – mostly Goodall’s story. And it is remarkable when you consider that when she went into the jungle to try and observe chimps, she was a 26 year old secretary, with no scientific training, who was afraid of the chimps because she didn’t know she was supposed to be. Yet, she was able to observe them, in part because, she just didn’t go anywhere – they got used to her. Her journey from an untrained secretary to one of the most justly celebrated scientists of her era is remarkable. It is the stuff of Hollywood dreams of when they set about making a biopic.

 

And perhaps that’s why the material is ended up being shaped that way, especially as the film goes along. It’s odd no one has thought to make a fictionalized biopic of the woman – she’s certainly less controversial than Diann Fossey, who was the subject of Gorillas in the Mist (1988) with Sigourney Weaver (although, perhaps that project was greenlit because of Fossey’s murder a few years before, making her even more famous than she already was). The film is able to draw some fascinating observations from Goodall about her life – and how she learned a lot about herself from her time with the chimps – especially as it relates to be a mother (one wonders if a man would be asked this question, but Goodall seems comfortable with it, so whatever). The film foregrounds the budding romance between Goodall and Van Lawick, and later their son, Grub. Personally, I would have liked more on the chimps, and what was there – and less shots of the modern Goodall, who is clearly invaluable to the film, but also interrupts the visual flow of the film.

 

Still, it’s hard to complain about Jane – which features remarkable sights and sounds throughout, and really does tell a fascinating story – even if it’s one we’ve heard before, it’s not one we’ve seen quite this way.

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Movie Review: Like Me

Like Me *** / *****

Directed by: Robert Mockler.

Written by: Robert Mockler.

Starring: Addison Timlin (Kiya), Larry Fessenden (Marshall), Ian Nelson (Burt), Jeremy Gardner (Freddie), Ana Asensio (Anna), Nicolette Pierini (Julia), Stuart Rudin (Henry). 

 

I’ve been sitting with Like Me – Robert Mockler’s debut film – for a few days now, trying to sort through just what I thought of the film. It isn’t a subtle film, and I’m not sure that the message of the film is any deeper than social media is a vile cesspool of human depravity, but I’m not sure it needs to me. While the concept and narrative are thin, Mockler goes over-the-top stylistically – this is a Natural Born Killers inspired fever dream visually. The lead performance by Addison Timlin – which is about the exact opposite of her work as the sweet, quiet Goth kid turned nun in Little Sister from a couple years ago, gets under the skin of this young woman, whose existence seems to hinge on getting likes.

 

The movie opens with Timlin’s Kiya – in a mask, holding a convenience store clerk at gunpoint, and filming the whole thing on her iPhone for upload to Youtube. She doesn’t say anything as she holds him up – and its amusing and creepy to watch him as he flails in front of the camera, not quite sure what to do or how to react even before she pulls out the gun, at which point, he pisses himself. The video draws a lot of attention on social media – of course – and soon Kiya is the talk of the internet. Most people find it funny – while, of course, stressing that they don’t really condone it per se, but it’s funny. One person who isn’t impressed is Burt (Ian Nelson) – an internet troll spewing out hateful misogyny in his response to Kiya’s video. Kiya is smart though – and sees how many “likes” she is getting, and knows she needs to up the ante. This is when she kidnaps a pervy motel owner – Marshall (Larry Fessenden, because if you need a creep in an ultra-low budget horror or horror adjacent film, you are legally required to hire Fessenden). The pair end up kind of, sort of bonding – and their drug fueled road trip gets stranger.

 

The film is obsessed with over-consumption – of all kinds. Mockler shows the audience, in graphic, sickening detail people eating junk food - nowhere worse than when, shortly after they meet, Kiya ties Marshall to a bed, and then force feeds junk of all kinds. The message is clear – this is sickening and disgusting, but so is everything being done online, which is over-consumption of a different sort.

 

Timlin really is terrific as Kiya – there is a blankness to her performance, as Kiya is someone who just doesn’t quite connect with people. She is an outsider, who wants to be a liked and loved (at least online), but cannot connect with people in any normal fashion. That is what ultimately connects her Marshall – an outsider of a different sort. Their connection makes up the dramatic heft of the movie, and it works, because Timlin and Fessenden work well together, and go to dark places as well. The biggest problem with the movie is probably the Burt character – who as played by Nelson is a one-dimensional, alt-right troglodyte – and not even an all that convincing one (sorry, but I don’t for a second buy that Burt would get THIS big on the internet). He is supposed to complete a sort of outsider triangle of the three characters – you need to have people like Kiya, like Marshall and like Burt, or else this sort of thing on the internet doesn’t work – it doesn’t get pushed this far. If you torment a store clerk on the internet, and no one is watching, did it even happen? But Burt as conceived and performed never really becomes anything deeper than a meme.

 

As a director, Mockler basically goes madly over-the-top, from pretty much the moment after the opening sequence in the convenience store, and doesn’t slow done. I bet the style will turn many off – or just give them massive headaches – but as someone who loved Oliver Stone in the 1990s, I quite liked the go-for-broke style here. Besides, indie movies have become fairly tame visually – they all look and feel the same. Mockler is showing even on a small budget, you can go mad visually.

 

Like Me is far from a perfect film – but it’s a fascinating one from beginning to end, shows that Timlin should be getting better roles, and marks Mockler as a director I want to see what he does next, You may up hating it – but it still deserves some attention.

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Movie Review: Thoroughbreds

Thoroughbreds **** / *****

Directed by: Cory Finley.

Written by: Cory Finley.

Starring: Anya Taylor-Joy (Lily), Olivia Cooke (Amanda), Anton Yelchin (Tim), Paul Sparks (Mark), Kaili Vernoff (Karen).

 

Thoroughbreds is a thrilling about a couple of affluent, perhaps sociopathic teenage girls that was written and directed by Cory Finley – who is amazingly making his directorial debut. Finley knows his material well, and doesn’t make the mistake that many first timers do in terms of trying to do too much or overloading on style for style’s sake. Make no mistake, Thoroughbreds is a very stylish film – but it’s one that is keenly attuned to its characters and themes. This is a cold, calculating thriller, punched up initially with witty banter, which only makes what follows all the more disturbing.

 

The film is set in a very affluent area of Connecticut, largely within the walls of mansion where Lily (Anya Taylor-Joy) lives with her mother and stepfather, Mark (Paul Sparks). We first enter this home to see her tutoring Amanda (Olivia Cooke) – and they two girls are as different as can be in appearance and demeanor. Lily is put together prim and proper, and Amanda looks like a mess. Amanda is direct in a way that’s initially off-putting for Lily, who finds her weird. The two girls were once close friends, but have gone their own ways in recent years. They are getting back together, because Lily is so perfect that she graduated her prep school early, and returned home, while Amanda is awaiting trial for a disturbing incident involving her horse. Their friendship sparks when Amanda witnesses Lily interact with Mark for a few seconds of seemingly innocuous conversation, and immediately senses (correctly) that Lily hates her stepfather with a passion. Eventually, the pair decide the best thing to do would be to kill him. But how?

 

The film is split up into chapters – complete with title cards (they’re not really necessary, but do break up the action). The opening scenes are the two girls feeling each other out. This is probably where the comparisons some have made to Heathers comes from – because these exchanges can be witty and funny – especially when Cooke is delivering direct, acid tongued one-liners, which she does brilliantly. In these scenes, Lily seems to be the more normal of the two – but she’s sizing everything up. While we sense from the get go that Amanda may be a sociopath – she says early on she has no feelings at all (other than hungry or tired), but has become gifted at faking them (something psychopaths excel at). Lily suffers from something else – but certainly something – and is just as gifted at reading others as Amanda is, and better able to manipulate them that her “weird” friend.

 

The friendship between the two of the make up the bulk of the movie. There is a lengthy subplot involving them trying to enlist Tim (the late, great Anton Yelchin), a drug dealer, with a statutory rape conviction, who nonetheless is still hanging out and selling pot to the teenagers in the area. Tim is undeniably sleaze, but in Yelchin’s hands he becomes an oddly endearing character – a pathetic guy, with delusions of grandeur, trying to act tougher than he is. He may not be the smartest character in the world – but he’s smart enough to know when he’s outmatched. For sparks, in the other major role as the stepdad, it’s the best work I’ve seen from him (that’s not saying much – he’s awful in House of Cards) – but he’s essentially playing a rich asshole, who gets to keeping being an asshole because he’s rich. The regular rules don’t apply to him – which is true of the girls to, who have grown up in this affluent area.

 

You pick a few nits in Thoroughbreds if you wanted to. There’s nothing overly original about the observation that even in houses that look like that, there can still be this level of malevolence and violence (there is a hint of Michael Haneke to the film, except these characters aren’t as blind to their horrific nature as his characters are). While the climax of the film is brilliantly staged, I do think it comes on a little too quickly, and I’m not entirely sure I buy the reasons behind Amanda’s actions.

 

Yet, those are relatively minor quibbles – ones that only bother me a little in retrospect, not in the moment. Overall, Thoroughbreds is a chilling thriller – one that has more in common with Hitchcock than Heathers, and one that announces a major new talent in Finley.

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Movie Review: A Wrinkle in Time

A Wrinkle in Time *** / *****

Directed by: Ava DuVernay.

Written by: Jennifer Lee based on the novel by Madeleine L'Engle.

Starring: Storm Reid (Meg Murry), Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Dr. Kate Murry), Chris Pine (Dr. Alex Murry), Reese Witherspoon (Mrs. Whatsit), Oprah Winfrey (Mrs. Which), Mindy Kaling (Mrs. Who), Levi Miller (Calvin), Deric McCabe (Charles Wallace), Michael Peña (Red), Zach Galifianakis (The Happy Medium), Rowan Blanchard (Veronica), André Holland (Principal Jenkins).

 

It would be easy to nitpick Ava DuVernay’s film version of A Wrinkle in Time to death. The film is deeply flawed in ways that are immediately apparent when you watch it, and grow in your mind as you look back over it. A decade ago, I probably would have cynically written off the film as overly earnest and cheesy – and a decade from now, I may well do the same thing. But at this moment, I had the perfect way of viewing DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time – and that is through the eyes of my almost seven year old daughter, who sat next to me throughout the film, at times astonished by what she was watching, and at other times deeply relating to what was up there. It’s not enough for me to think that A Wrinkle in Time is a great movie – hell, it may not even be a very good movie. But watching her watch the film, and then talking about it after made me grateful that such a film exists.

 

The film stars newcomer Storm Reid as Meg Murry, an unpopular girl, somewhere in the 12-13 year old age range, who is still reeling from the disappearance of her physicist father Alex (Chris Pine) four years earlier. Along with her mother, the two had developed a theory about the ability to travel through space and time – using only your mind. And then, he vanished (gee, I wonder what happened?). One day, Meg meets three interesting women – Mrs. Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon), who is cheerful and a little ditzy, in a lovable Glinda the Good Witch kind of way, Mrs. Who (Mindy Kaling), who is very wise, but speaks almost entirely in quotes by geniuses, and Mrs. Which (Oprah Winfrey), who is basically Oprah spewing her brand of inspirational positivity. Along with her genius little brother Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe) and the boy she has a school girl crush on, Calvin (Levi Miller), she embarks on her own journey across space and time to find her father – going from one amazing planet to the next, meeting one amazing character after another.

 

Some of this works better than others. The special effects in the movie are hit and miss – I have a hard time believing it was a budgetary issue, since this is a Disney film – yet I think we can all agree that a sequence involving a character turning into a giant, floating lettuce leaf doesn’t really work. There are lots of special effects sequences that do however – especially when the movie finally reaches its last stop in the rescue mission. DuVernay relies perhaps too heavily on close-ups throughout the film – it can became distracting at times. The characters are mostly thinly written, and the talented cast isn’t always able to overcome that. Witherspoon mainly does – in part because it seems like Mrs. Whatsit is a role tailor made for her skillset, so she is mostly a delight. Poor Kaling cannot do much with a character than has to end every sentence with the name of a famous writer, and the country they are from. I’d be tempted to write off Winfrey as stunt casting – except because of the nature of what Mrs. Which says, I’m not sure anyone could make the role work better than Oprah does.

 

Besides, the movie stays grounded because of a really good performance by young Reid. It is a difficult role for her to play, one that requires elements of the fantastical, and yet grounded in real life insecurities and anxieties of little girls everywhere. I think this is what my daughter related to more than anything. She’s a sweet kid (and before you think I’m just looking at her through rose colored, parents glasses, let me say that my other daughter, who is 4, is a holy terror, who my wife and I joke we will one day have to visit in prison) who nervously applied to, and had to write an essay to get onto her school’s “Kindness Crew”. This film’s wholly, unironic embrace of kindness and goodness, as well as embracing every part of you – even your flaws – is something we don’t see very often – and we never see directed towards little girls (rarer still, to see it directed at African American girls – but I digress). This is a rare film that was made specifically for her. The elements that make it cheesy or easily laughed off by more cynical people, are exactly why she embraced it.

 

This doesn’t excuse the movie for its storytelling faults, or other mistakes along the way, but it goes a long way to mitigating them for me. When I looked around the movie – in the background – I also saw a world that DuVernay has created that perhaps is as fantastical as the other planets – an idealized vision of our world – perhaps the one created by Warriors like the film described. Yes, I can be cynical – but I find it impossible to be so with this film, which I got to see through the eyes of my daughter who saw something greater than herself up there on that screen – and wanted to be a part of it.

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Movie Review: The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches

The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches **** / *****

Directed by: Simon Lavoie.

Written by: Simon Lavoie based on the novel by Gaétan Soucy.

Starring: Marine Johnson (Ali / Alice), Antoine L'Écuyer (Frère), Jean-François Casabonne (Père), Alex Godbout (Paul-Marie), Laurie Babin (Juste).

 

The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches is a bleak, black and white drama from Quebec. It is a film that starts out mysteriously, and has those mysteries deepen over the majority of its runtime. Yes, it basically wraps everything up by the end – a little too neatly for my taste – but overall, this is a challenging film about sexual oppression, religion, misogyny and its lasting impact. It is also a stunning film to look at – shot in stark black and white, the film can be brutal and hard-to-watch, but it never crosses the line into exploitation.

 

Set in 1930s, rural Quebec, the film centers of Ali (Marine Johnson), a teenage girl, being raised by her father (Jean-Francois Casabonne), shuttered away from the outside world alongside her brother (Antoine L'Écuyer). They are so sheltered, that their father is able to raise Ali as a boy – telling her penis just fell off as a child, along with cutting her hair short, and binding her breasts. But the outside world can only stay outside for so long – as is set in motion when her brother rapes her one day in the woods (I honestly don’t know what to make of the rape scene in the film – it’s quick, and non-exploitive, but I’m not quite sure what to make of the “how” it came about. It almost seems more like it was necessary to the plot, and not overly thought out). When her father examines her one night, and figures out she’s pregnant, that’s when he loses it. He will end up hanging himself, naked, in their house – his body becoming a source of fascination to both teenagers (Frere wonders if his penis is where they came from). And I haven’t even mentioned the strange, Gollum like person chained in the barn that the father refers to as Just Punishment, which Ali will shorten to Juste.

 

The first act of The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches is mysterious, as it locks us into Ali’s perspective, so we only figure things out as she does. Obviously, we know a few things before she does – namely, that she’s a girl (because we have eyes) – and also that her father’s behavior is not normal – from the way he chases off outsiders, to the bizarre religious rituals, to Juste out on the barn, we are far more concerned about his behavior that Ali is – who sees this as normal.

 

His death really is the catalyst for the rest of the story – that will unfold from them, piling on one revelation after another. Johnson is great in the lead role. Her performance is urgent and animalistic, without going over-the-top. She maintains our sympathy, even as more secrets spill out. L'Écuyer is fine as Frere as well – although he perhaps goes a little too far as the film spirals towards it climax, and he tries with increasing desperation to fill his father’s shoes.

 

The film was adapted (apparently liberally, since you cannot hide Ali being a girl in a film like you can in a book) by Simon Lavoie, from Gaétan Soucy’s novel. Like Lavoie’s last film – Those Who Make Revolution Halfway Only Dig Their Own Graves (that one was co-directed by Marc Denis) – it is a bold, stylistic film, although in a much different style (that film called back to the Godard films of the 1960s with its use of color). Here, he has gone for something much more stark and unrelenting in his use of black and white, and handheld camera work. It gives the film a raw, animalistic feel that perfectly matches its content.

 

I do wish that the film didn’t quite feel the end to tie up every loose end. I was enjoying the ambiguity of the film as it progressed, and I don’t think that wrapping it up with a neat bow was really the only way to go here. On the other hand, the story certainly isn’t over when the film ends – and its anyone’s guess as to what comes next. Overall, I think The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches confirms the potential that Lavoie showed in Those Who Dig Their Own Graves, which is a film I liked, but at nearly three hours was WAY too long, considering it had no real story. Both are provocative and daring stories about Quebec’s past – and moving into the future. Canadian film needs some new blood to in it – and Lavoie has the potential to be great.

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Movie Review: Death Wish

Death Wish ** / *****

Directed by: Eli Roth.

Written by: Joe Carnahan based on the novel by Brian Garfield and the screenplay by Wendell Mayes.

Starring: Bruce Willis (Paul Kersey), Vincent D'Onofrio (Frank Kersey), Elisabeth Shue (Lucy Kersey), Camila Morrone (Jordan Kersey), Dean Norris (Detective Kevin Raines), Beau Knapp (Knox), Kimberly Elise (Detective Leonore Jackson), Len Cariou (Ben), Jack Kesy (The Fish), Ronnie Gene Blevins (Joe), Kirby Bliss Blanton (Bethany).

 

I can easily see a way that a version of Death Wish could be updated, and relevant, for 2018 – but the version directed by Eli Roth is not that film. The 1974 original starred Charles Bronson, as a man pushed too far, after his wife and daughter victims of a home invasion – the wife raped and murdered, the daughter raped and traumatized – Bronson decides to strike back at the “animals” who did this too his family – even if he doesn’t really know who those people are. That spoke to audiences in 1974 – when violent crime in America really was on the rise, and people in major cities were afraid to go out at night. In 2018, violent crime is actually down – the lowest it’s been in decades – but there are places (Fox News, the NRA among them) who still want to make people afraid – it’s good for business. I think a new version of Death Wish should at least address that. But this movie doesn’t really do that – it is basically a feature length version of the NRA tagline “Nothing will stop a bad guy with a gun, except a good guy with a gun”.

 

This time the movie takes place in Chicago, not New York (it’s no coincidence, they’ve picked the most violent city in America), and Paul Kersey (Bruce Willis) is now a surgeon, not an architect (or an accountant, as he was in the original novel). He has a beautiful wife (Elisabeth Shue) and teenage daughter (Camila Morrone) about to go off to college. The same basic thing happens as in the original – a trio of thugs break into the house when Paul isn’t there – his wife ends up dead, his daughter in a coma (thankfully, the movie spares us of either of them getting raped, although the threat is certainly there with the daughter). Paul ends up getting himself a gun, and going out onto the streets to get revenge on all the bad people out there. Two detectives, Raines and Jackson (Dean Norris and Kimberly Elise) try to find out who attacked his family. When Kersey visits Raines at work one day, and sees a bulletin board full of open homicides, he is assured that most of those crimes are gang related – “asshole on asshole” crimes that won’t be solved. But Kersey’s case is different. He doesn’t say why, but then again, he doesn’t need to.

 

The movie gets bloody – as you expect from a movie from Roth. He lingers over one scene of torture in particular, but all of the violence in the film is over-the-top in how bloody and ridiculous it can be. Roth cannot seem to decide if he wants to go full on exploitation and fun with the violence (hell, there’s a scene in which one of the bad guy literally gets hit in the head with a bowling ball) or he wants to make something where the violence hurts – where you feel it in the audience.

 

The original novel that Death Wish is based on is actually very anti-vigilante justice – the novel’s Paul Kersey essentially goes insane, and by the end of the novel is killing unarmed kids because he doesn’t like the way they look. He even wrote a sequel after the original movie came out to make his stance even more explicit (that book was turned into a much better, underseen movie by James Wan in 2007 – although it doesn’t have all that much to do with the novel either). The original movie at least pays lip service to being anti-vigilante as well – the cop investigating the crimes figures out who is behind them, and wants to arrest him – but his hands are tied by the higher ups. No matter what Roth says in interviews about the film (and by the way, whenever I read interviews with Roth, I am always struck by the feeling that I would really like the movie he thought he made – it just rarely matches the movie he actually made), that’s basically gone here. There is one good sequence in the film – a montage of Kersey the surgeon removing bullets from shooting victims, and Kersey the vigilante dad loading his gun that points out the absurdity of the two sides of him), but the film never really delves into that. There are talk radio montages that debate the killings Kersey does – when he becomes a social media celebrity the “Grim Reaper” because of YouTube videos of him in action.

 

I think much of this undercut though by the fact that unlike the original novel or film, this Kersey actually does track down those responsible for hurting his family. It’s harder to question that sort of justice being meted out against people we know are guilty, and have seen do horrible things. This Kersey is far easier to understand and root for.

 

Willis is probably the wrong actor to play this role – but then again, so was Bronson (originally, the 1974 film was supposed to be directed by Sidney Lumet, and Jack Lemmon was to star – Bronson always said that he thought the role should have gone to Dustin Hoffman – although, Hoffman did a version of it in Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs in 1971). Willis is an action hero, so we immediately accept him as a killing machine and a hero. The film is essentially a fantasy version for every civilian with a gun, who knows – just KNOWS – that if he was at that school, that concert, that mall when that asshole started shooting everyone with an AR-15, that he would run in, and put an end to it. There was a possibility that a new Death Wish could reflect on, or at least mirror, the America that exists today. This isn’t that film.

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Movie Review: Red Sparrow

Red Sparrow ** ½ / *****

Directed by: Francis Lawrence.

Written by: Justin Haythe based on the novel by Jason Matthews.

Starring: Jennifer Lawrence (Dominika Egorova), Joel Edgerton (Nathaniel Nash), Matthias Schoenaerts (Vanya Egorov), Charlotte Rampling (Matron), Mary-Louise Parker (Stephanie Boucher), Ciarán Hinds (Zakharov), Joely Richardson (Nina), Bill Camp (Marty Gable), Jeremy Irons (Korchnoi), Thekla Retuen (Marta), Douglas Hodge (Maxim Volontov), Sakina Jaffrey (Trish Forsythe).

 

The fundamental problem that Red Sparrow is never able to overcome is that it is a movie entirely about its plot, and yet its plot doesn’t really matter. You never really feel that all that much is at stake during the runtime, because the movie never really tells you what exactly is at stake. All we really know is a Russian spy, Dominika (Jennifer Lawrence) has been assigned to go to Budapest to cozy up to an American spy, Nate Nash (Joel Edgerton) to find out who Nash’s mole inside Russian intelligence is. Since we don’t know what this mole does, or what information he is providing, we never really know what will happen if the mole is exposed. In theory, it shouldn’t matter – it should be a classic McGuffin, in which it doesn’t matter to the audience why it matters to the characters, just that we know it does. Yet, it’s hard to find anything else to hold onto in the movie. It’s a movie that wants to keep you guessing as to whether or not Lawrence’s character is going to sell out her country for America, or whether she’s playing the American spy for Mother Russia. It jerks you around so much that you end up not caring at all. What’s worse, the movie has little in the way of action or suspense set pieces, and with a runtime over two hours, it’s more than a little bit of a grueling slog.

 

Before we even get to all that spy craft, we first have to watch as Lawrence’s Dominika is molded and degraded into becoming a spy in the first place. She is, as the film opens, a prima ballerina for the Bolshoi Ballet – but a horrific injury ends her career. With a dead father, sick mother, and no other job skills – she has no choice but to accept the offer of her Uncle Vanya (Matthias Schoenaerts – it’s been a while since I’ve seen a version of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya so I won’t go delve into why the film felt the need to have such an obvious character name) when he enlists her to do a job for him. He’s a high ranking intelligence officer, and wants to get close to a very rich man – who had eyes for Dominika as a dancer. All she has to do is get close, and get his phone. Things, of course, don’t play out that way – and she’s given another impossible choice – take a bullet in the back of the head, or go to Sparrow School – which she will call (not incorrectly) Whore School – to learn how to seduce anyone. Find their weak spots, and exploit them. She is apparently so good at this that she’s pulled out early to be sent to Budapest.

 

Red Sparrow is an odd movie. In many ways, it feels like an exploitation movie – this is a movie in which Lawrence is raped, tortured, beaten, stripped and engages in consensual sexual activity as well. The film takes itself so seriously though that all these scenes feel cruel. The elements of the film that could have been made into an erotic thriller a la Brian DePalma featuring Lawrence and Edgerton don’t really work either – as talented as both of them as actors, they share almost zero chemistry. The major sex scenes between the two of them is over is about as much time as the one in Lady Bird – that was the joke in Lady Bird, that the teenage boy finished so quickly – I don’t know what it says in Red Sparrow.

 

What almost saves the movie is the supporting cast more than the leads. I’d watch an entire movie about Mary Louise Parker’s character – the Chief of Staff of a US Senator, who is selling sensitive information. She is drunk the entire time, and a hell of a lot of fun, and the entire extended sequence involving her is easily the best in the movie – the one time when the suspense of the film is truly humming at the level it should. Charlotte Rampling also comes and goes too quickly as Matron – the head of Sparrow School, who emotionlessly tells them that “your bodies belong to the state”. Jeremy Irons and Ciaran Hinds show up as well, so you expect them to do more than they do – but are fine when they’re there. I liked Matthias Schoenaerts’ performance as Uncle Vanya as well, even if his character makes little to no sense.

 

The director of the film is Francis Lawrence, who directed Jennifer Lawrence in the last three Hunger Games movies, and the two clearly have a trusting relationship between director and star. Here, though, they don’t really find the right material. The story goes on too long, and because Lawrence (the director) has decided to direct the whole movie in the muted, depressing tones of a cold war spy movie, with none of the excitement, the film just kind of goes through the motions. Lawrence, the actress, really commits to the role (if not the accent, entirely, which comes and goes). There’s just not much here to make it all worthwhile.   

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